My View on the current Faeria meta

[lbrande]

Hi guys, my name is lbrande. I consider myself a rather experienced Faeria player, I have reached god rank all seasons except season 2 and I have also played in the monhly cup four times. During the last couple of weeks I’ve heard a lot of opinions about the current meta, everything from rush being all to good to slam destroying the game. Now I will give you my view of the current meta.

This meta compared to former metas

I know many of you will completely disagree with me on this but I think the current meta is the best and most diverse meta Faeria has ever seen. This does not mean that I don’t think there are any problems in the current meta which I indeed do. If you belong to them who disagree the current meta is good I am now going to go through a few reasons to why I am thinking it is the best meta Faeria has ever seen. To do this I am going to compare the 8 decks which I think are currently top tier in a few different ways. The 8 decks that will be compared are Mono Green, Blue Reaver, Midrange Red, Yellow Rush, Yellow Events, Green Yellow Sac, Red Yellow Burn and Angry Red Yellow.

Colors

One important thing for a healthy meta is that all colors are regularly used. Of the 8 decks I am comparing this is how many which use the respective colors:

Yellow: 5

Red: 3

Green: 2

Blue: 1

What we see here is that all colors are used in at least one top-tier deck which is good. If you look back a few months this was not the case, back then green was barely used at all. Even though the current color representation is not even it is better than it’s been through most of Early Access.

Rush, Midrange and Control

One way to categorize decks is to look at whether they don’t care about the wells (rush), care about the wells on one side of the board (midrange) or care about the wells on both sides of the board (control). If you categorize the 8 decks according to this you get the result below:

Rush: 1 (Yellow Rush, sometimes Midrange Red)

Midrange: 5 (Mono Green, Midrange Red, Yellow Events, Red Yellow Burn, Angry Red Yellow)

Control: 2 (Blue Reaver, Green Yellow Sac, sometimes Red Yellow Burn)

This speaks completely against the fact that there are to many rush decks. But it is of course just statistics, not all of these decks are used as much and Yellow Rush is probably the most used one of them. This categorization says that most of the current top tier decks are midrange, while the minority is made up of the extremes, which is probably what you want in a healthy meta. Without midrange decks it would be very hard for control decks to exist at all, because they would not be able to withstand all the rushes they faced.

Aggro, Combo and Control

CCGs are essentially a more advanced version of Rock, Paper, Scissors. The most common CCG replacement for Rock, Paper, Scissors is Aggro, Combo and Control. In this case Combo beats Aggro, Aggro beats Control and Control beats Combo. If categorize the 8 decks into one of these categories this is what you end up with:

Aggro: 3 (Mono Green, Midrange Red, Yellow Rush)

Combo: 3 (Green Yellow Sac, Red Yellow Burn, Angry Red Yellow)

Control: 2 (Blue Reaver, Yellow Events)

In this categorization the decks are spread as evenly as possible across the categories, which should make for a very even Rock, Paper, Scissors. This is not the whole story though, this meta actually has quite a few problems which I haven’t touched yet.

Problems

All my statistics point in the direction that current Faeria meta is almost as good as it gets, which is of course not the case, but why. I think that the reason this is the case is not because of the meta itself but because of the insane power level of a few individual cards. The reason this is bad for the game is because this results in many games being decided by who can draw most over powered cards, which does make for a very RNG based game. Below comes a list of the cards I think are problematic because of them being a bit to strong.

Green:

Sagami Huntmaster - This becomes espeially clear in Green vs. Green matchups which are often decided by who manages to first play a huntmaster to teleport a slam creature.

Feral Kodama - For a very long time I actually thought Kodama was fine, until I played against someone who actually knew how to use them. The thing with slam is that it’s not a very good Trait, until you use it to go offensive, in which case you often outright win the game because your opponent just can’t defend against it.

Blue:

Forbidden Library - I think noone will disagree with this. In some mathups an early library essentially means you have won the game, because you will just get such a big advantage that your opponent will never catch up if they don’t kill it almost instantly.

Dream Reaver - This one is just obvious, no other card combo in Faeria can one-hit an opponent as easily as the Dream Reaver + Gabrian Enchantment combo, and also the stats are just to good for a non-green creature costing that little.

Yellow

Annoying Gnat - This card is bad for Faeria in so many ways. These are my main reasons to why: 1. Faeria cards just shall not be this random. The difference between the gnat spawning where you want it to spawn and on the opposite side of the board is just huge. 2. The decks built around gnat are so heavily dependent on those that they are awesome when you draw it, and useless when you don’t.

Doomsday - Clearing the board this easily is just too good, especially in Yellow where you can easily get new faeria the same turn in which you play Doomsday. As Doomsday looks right now it has to cost more than it currently does to be reasonable.

[J0k3se]

Thank you for your post Ibrande!
I really appreciate it when players put some time into their posts and really go in depth with their thoughts and arguments (Cappu, Skorch and some others often do this).

Very interesting read!
I agree that the meta is really diverse at the moment, there has been many situations when one deck was far more consistant and powerfull than the rest, and even before when the meta has been “diverse” it has usually been 3 or maybe 4 viable decks.

I find it interesting that you only list 1 viable blue deck, while I feel like I always face blue But it is almost the same deck (small variations).

My thoughts on the cards you feel are causing issues:

Huntmaster. I havent really faced any green in ages, but whenever my opponent has creatures on the board and is playing green, I try to play with huntmaster in mind. ESPECIALLY if a creature has slam. I agree that the card is very strong, but its also a really really fun card that I would really miss if it was removed. I dont think the cost should be higher, if a change were to be made I would prefer to reduce the body to be a 1/1 or something.

Feral Kodama. This card is powerfull, sure. I think it is too early to say its too strong though. In this post https://www.faeria.com/news/announcements/123-faeria-friday-the-gameplay-landscape the devs are hinting that there might be a change to Slam. Lets wait and see what happens

Forbidden Library. This card is REALLY strong, IF you get it out early.

Dream Reaver. A really powerfull card aswell, and not very difficult to unlock to be honest despite the land requirements. If the stats were altered (read: lowered) the enchantment-combo wouldnt be as powerfull. I am probably the only one, but i miss the first version of the reaver Playing with the old reaver was so so fun.

Annoying Gnat. It is far better now than it used to be, but I agree that there is just too much RNG with this card. If they could somehow remove the RNG positioning without breaking it, that would be great. What if the person who kills the gnat decides where it should spawn? For example, if you kill your own Gnat with a sac-spell, you get to chose a target (would be suuuper strong). But if your opponent could decide where it spawns that would also be super strong, he/she could kill it 5 times in a single turn to deal 10 damage to you.

Doomsday. I think doomsday is great for the game and I would like to have more boardclears and removal to be honest.

[Amaznazaz]

Newer player, but I basically agree 100% with lbrande in terms of the nature of all of those cards. I think the rock/paper/scissors categories match pretty well with my experience in the game too.

Slam is also really good defensively if the opponent feels that they’ve stabilized against your aggression and try to close the game with a horde of minions. The threat of a Kodama on your back line importantly prevents them from advancing together, which can give you time to fight them off with defensive creatures and find a dastardly Huntmaster.

I don’t think Dream Reaver needs to be a self-contained lethal machine, but if it really is supposed to take out opponent with just an enchantment effect, maybe it could be a smaller minion with a bonus against Gods, so it can’t for example, eat 3 King’s or Queen’s guards on its way to lethal.

I think I’ve suggested it before, but if Gnat worked in the same way as Wild Growth and Vine Wall, it would be a lot less swingy. If it worked the same way as Seed Sower, it might even be fair for it to collect, which makes creatures a lot more strategically interesting.

As for Doomsday, I’m generally not a fan of hard removal (“destroy”) or board clears (“everything”) at all. For me, it’s a much more negative experience to play against than cards which have a constructive side, but I don’t mind removal that makes a roughly fair trade, by specifying the amount of damage that it can do (cards like Falcon Dive, Punishment, Hellfire etc).

If you compare Flame Burst with Wind Soldier, they cost the same amount, but instead of being able to collect, place aggressive lands and possibly be transformed or sacrificed, Flame Burst has “teleport anywhere, can move through units”. That seems kind of fair. Giving a Haste creature like Flame Burst Deathtouch (Last Nightmare) or letting it target the whole board (Firestorm) makes it able to get huge potential value with very little setup or strategy. For this reason, I really don’t like Doomsday, personally. That said, I think if the game is going to have a nasty hard board clear, the Health and Faeria maluses are pretty good and as that type of card goes, I like the design. I agree that the Desert or Faeria investment seems very low though. I’d like to see it cost 4 or maybe 5 Deserts to increase the setup and visibility of the threat.

Of course, all of these high-powered cards carry some high-powered deck archetypes, so they contribute to the relatively high diversity that Faeria has at the moment. It’s interesting to note that of the six “problem” cards, six of them are from the latest set of ten cards. This seems to me like the pitfall of introducing cards in somewhat low volumes. If a set of cards is designed to fix balance/diversity in a meta, by trying to do it with only ten cards, it seems guaranteed that some of those cards will be absurdly powerful and often problematic for a longer view of the game. Hopefully after 1.0, the team will be thinking of releasing cards in larger expansions, which are less vulnerable to this characteristic and can achieve balance and new, interesting decks in a more nuanced way.